If We Were Villains: The Sensational TikTok Book Club pick: M.L. Rio

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I want to thank Chaima, Melanie, and Aleksandra for encouraging me to read this, because honestly... dear god. Richard’s girlfriend and fellow fourth-year acting student. Red-headed Meredith is the most strikingly beautiful and sexually desirable of the group of seven actors. She is often physically objectified, something she both resents and exploits. Oliver’s best friend and roommate. James is the most handsome and studious of the fourth-year acting students. He is often cast as the hero but wants more diverse acting roles. Hounded by Richard, James becomes increasingly distraught as the novel progresses. James is sometimes portrayed as jealous of Meredith and Oliver’s relationship. the story is split between oliver ‘now,’ returning to the scene of the crime with colborne, and the story of everything that went on in this cult-like group ten years ago; of a group of people obsessed with shakespeare whose relationships with each other were as complicated as any tragedy - resentments and rivalries, sexual dalliances, unrequited longing, blood relatives and lovers, straight and gay, addictions and insecurities and the fine line between acting and lying, onstage combat and real-life consequences. If We Were Villains is the story of seven actors who are very close to graduating an elite college and achieving all of their ambitions when tragedy suddenly strikes. The thing I loved the most about this book is how art bleeds incessantly into reality. The characters are always so focused on their performances, so much that at times they are having a hard time distinguishing between their thoughts, their emotions, their motivations, and those of the characters they are playing on stage. Likewise, the reader has a hard time understanding what’s real and what is not. You could say that the novel is constantly trying to find an answer to the debate whether art imitates life or life imitates art more.

There Is Only One Bed: When James comes to visit Oliver in the middle of the night, they end up sharing a bed in Oliver's bedroom so they don't wake Oliver's family up.

She has an incredible gift for prose. I can hardly wait for her next book! (Melinda H). I loved every minute of it, thought it was brilliantly done, and was thoroughly captivated by the players and curious how it would end. A very special, well-thought-out, and well-executed debut novel (Diane S). This is one of the most intriguing, intricate and clever novels I've read in a long while (Shaun D)... continued Many readers including Cynthia d'Aprix Sweeney, the writer of The Nest, compared this novel to Donna Tartt's The Secret History. When James is cast as Macbeth in the yearly Halloween play, Richard is reduced to the part of a spirit. This enrages the ambitious Richard, who becomes angry & bitter. Parallel to the Macbeth sessions, the companions are rehearsing Julius Caesar, with Richard in the title role. Richard’s demeanour during Caesar practise becomes progressively obnoxious. Richard almost drowns James after the Macbeth performance, despite his assertions of innocence. The others save James and chide Richard, but they all agree to keep the incident hidden from their professors. A few hours later, Filippa summons Meredith and Oliver to the lake. There Oliver and Meredith discover a battered, broken and seemingly deceased Richard floating in the water. Richard emits a gurgling sound indicating he’s still alive. Frightened and exhausted of Richard’s abuse, the six collectively decide to let him die in the water, assuming that he injured himself while intoxicated. They craft a narrative of likely events for school administration and the police and feel relief when everyone seems to accept their version of events. But guilt erodes their relations with each other and impacts their behavior. Meredith and Oliver continue dating but struggle to be comfortable together under the watchful eye of Richard’s specter. Alexander indulges even more freely in drugs and alcohol. Wren withdraws into herself while James’s behavior becomes erratic. The only character who seems able to hold things together is Filippa. The Thanksgiving holiday offers little respite from their stress. When Oliver’s holiday plans to visit Meredith in New York are derailed by an unexpected visit from James, Meredith is upset that Oliver chooses James over her, a frequent point of contention.

I ended up looking up on reddit what the purpose of it all was and I feel that if I already had that knowledge then it would've def hit the way it was supposed to but it just unfortunately did not. A talented third-year drama student at Dellecher and Alexander’s love interest. Colin is one of the only younger students to be named in the novel and frequently interacts with the fourth-year cohort. James – A skilled performer and one of the seven theatrical pupils. He is easygoing, kind and enjoys being outside. A cellist who flirts with Meredith and is physically beaten by Richard. Allan remains unnamed until the police arrive to investigate Richard’s death, suggesting his relative unimportance to the main characters.Much like Donna Tartt's The Secret History, M. L. Rio's debut is a richly layered story of love, friendship, and obsession... If We Were Villains will keep you riveted through its final, electrifying moments. Then, almost inevitably: a murder. Now, ten years later, detective Colborne feels every choice he’d made, every action he took that fatal night, as a weight he carries with him. There are so many versions of the story, so many neat distillations of what had happened. Only one person can say which one was true. Yet what the students have done, or not done, causes them to unravel, both individually and as a group. James becomes violent, Alexander overdoses, Oliver sees Richard’s ghost, Wren withdraws from the others almost entirely, and Meredith struggles to sleep. Only Filippa seems unflappable and motivated, she explains late in the novel, to protect the only family she’s ever had. In the end, Oliver saves his peers, and especially James, when he accepts full responsibility for their collective decision. In so doing, he acts, as James had thought he might, as a tragic hero. His tragic flaw is generosity, taking on himself the burden of their shared guilt. His is a surprising choice, but one that deepens the novel’s investigation of the dynamics and implications of complicity. Which of us could say we were more sinned against than sinning? We were so easily manipulated - confusion made a masterpiece of us.” When you read the synopsis for this book, you will likely hear a voice saying, “Oh, this sounds interesting! Let's give it a shot.” And I’m here to tell you right now—that’s the devil talking.

You might think that the coolest things you can be might include traditional things, like "in possession of a motorcycle" or "a New York-based artist with family money" or "on some sort of high school athletic team / squad designated to cheer on said team."If We Were Villains is the story of a tightly knit group of seven lyric-mad Shakespearean thespians who seem to prefer each other’s company to anyone else’s, thereby offending the rest of the world. But as these things so often go, something dark and sinister soon sews hatred in them, and wedges its way between them. The friendship, once beautiful, begins to hold something worth fearing. At some point, our merry band of thespians become less friends and more things for each other to hit. Oliver is for sure the main character, and this book starts out with him getting out of prison ten years after the events of that frightful night. And he is finally telling the story of what actually happened. This book is also broken up in five acts, but we get to see the events of what really happened that night, a decade ago, and we get to see the ramifications of how that altered everyone’s lives in present day.